CoTerminal produces exactly one verdict per diagnostic. Not a score. Not a ranked list of options. One strategic direction — the one the system determined is most defensible given your intake, your market context, and your operator capacity. That verdict is the product of eight parallel domain analyses, a cross-check layer that stress-tests the reasoning for contradictions, and a synthesis layer that weighs everything together. The five possible verdicts are: Scale, Refine, Validate, Pivot, and Rebuild.
The Five Verdicts
Scale
Refine
Validate
Pivot
Rebuild
Scale
What it means: Your product is working, the market conditions are right, and the evidence supports accelerating. The primary constraint on your growth is execution velocity — not direction.When you get it: Scale verdicts emerge from a specific convergence of signals: validated product-market fit with measurable evidence, strong market timing, healthy unit economics, and sufficient operator capacity to absorb growth. All four conditions need to be present. A product with great PMF but critical capacity depletion does not get a Scale verdict.Confidence ceiling: 95%. Scale carries the highest possible confidence ceiling because the underlying signals are the most measurable and verifiable of any verdict type. Strong intake data with clear financial and market evidence can push confidence to the top of the range.What follows: Your Living Action Plan focuses on acceleration levers — scaling what is working, removing execution bottlenecks, and building the operational capacity to sustain growth. Leverage Moves will prioritize distribution, hiring, and infrastructure ahead of product iteration.Refine
What it means: Your strategic direction is correct, but the execution, positioning, or specific mechanics need adjustment. You are not in the wrong market or building the wrong product — you are off on one or more specific dimensions that are fixable without changing direction.When you get it: Refine verdicts typically surface when the pipeline finds a solid foundation with specific, identifiable misalignments. Common signals include: pricing that does not match the value delivered, an ICP definition that is broader than the actual paying customer, or positioning that is not resonating with the market segment you are actually reaching. The core product and direction are sound; the implementation needs sharpening.Confidence ceiling: 90%. Refine verdicts carry high confidence because the evidence pattern is relatively clear — the system can identify what is working and what is not with reasonable precision.What follows: Your Living Action Plan focuses on the specific misalignments identified in the diagnostic. Leverage Moves will typically address pricing mechanics, ICP tightening, or positioning adjustments — not product rebuilds or market pivots.Validate
What it means: The evidence available is insufficient to make a confident directional call. Before committing significant resources in any direction, you need more signal.When you get it: Validate verdicts reflect one of two situations. First, genuine early-stage uncertainty — the product is new, the market data is thin, and there is not enough evidence to reason confidently across multiple domains. Second, critically depleted operator capacity — even if the directional evidence is present, a founder or team at critical capacity depletion cannot execute on a Scale, Refine, Pivot, or Rebuild verdict. In the latter case, the system issues a forced Validate to protect you from committing to execution you cannot sustain.Confidence ceiling: 85%. The ceiling is moderate because the verdict is partially determined by absence of evidence rather than presence of strong signal. The system is less certain what the right direction is — which is exactly why it is telling you to validate before committing.What follows: Your Living Action Plan focuses on the specific validation activities that would unlock a clearer directional verdict. Leverage Moves will define the experiments, conversations, or data-gathering activities with the highest signal value. The goal is to run the diagnostic again in 30–60 days with stronger evidence.Pivot
What it means: Your current strategic vector is not working and a meaningful directional change is warranted. The evidence does not support continuing on your current path.When you get it: Pivot verdicts emerge from directional failure signals: ICP misalignment (you are building for a customer who is not buying), market timing mismatch (the market is not ready or has already moved past your entry point), or product-market fit failure (the product is not solving the problem well enough for the customer who has the problem). The signal is that your current direction has a low probability of reaching your stated goal even with refinement.Confidence ceiling: 80%. Calling a pivot requires the system to reason about what is not working and what a better direction might look like — both of which carry more uncertainty than assessing an existing signal. The ceiling reflects that inherent complexity.What follows: Your Living Action Plan focuses on the pivot vector — defining the new direction, the reorientation of resources, and the sequencing of the transition. Leverage Moves will address what to stop, what to preserve, and what the new starting position looks like.Rebuild
What it means: The core product or business model has structural problems that cannot be resolved through refinement or reorientation. Fundamental restructuring is required.When you get it: Rebuild verdicts are issued when the pipeline finds deep structural failures across multiple domains simultaneously — not a single misalignment, but a pattern of compounding problems that trace back to foundational decisions about the product, the business model, or the technical architecture. These are not surface-level issues. A Rebuild verdict means the system has determined that building on the current foundation would produce the same structural failures at larger scale.Confidence ceiling: 70%. Rebuild carries the lowest confidence ceiling of the five verdicts. Calling for fundamental restructuring involves a high degree of judgment about what a new foundation should look like — and that judgment is inherently less certain than assessing an existing signal. A 70% confidence Rebuild is not a weak signal. It is the system being honest about the uncertainty involved in a major call.What follows: Your Living Action Plan focuses on the restructuring sequence — what to wind down, what to preserve and carry forward, and how to approach the rebuild in a way that does not deplete your remaining runway before you have traction on the new foundation.The Locked Verdict Principle
Your verdict is locked after generation. It does not change because you disagree with it, because you hoped for a different answer, or because MIA chat agrees with your counterargument. This is a deliberate design choice, not a technical limitation.
Organizations — including founder-led startups — need a stable decision anchor. The value of the verdict comes from its resistance to motivated reasoning. If the verdict could be talked out of position by a founder who wanted a different answer, it would not be worth having.
The action plan is living. The verdict is not. Your Living Action Plan adapts as you complete steps, log check-ins, and add new context. The direction does not.
Confidence ceilings are set by design, not by data quality. A Rebuild verdict at 68% confidence is not a weaker signal than a Scale verdict at 88% — they operate on different scales. The ceiling for Rebuild is 70% because the inherent uncertainty in calling for fundamental restructuring is higher by nature. The “What Would Sharpen This Analysis” section tells you what additional data would have pushed the confidence higher within that verdict’s range — not across verdict types.
Confidence Ceilings at a Glance